I just really want to see Dunn traded.. I'm hoping the Orioles get desperate because LaRoche will sign with Wash and Smoak isn't really an option.

I'd take pretty much anything for Dunn, but how great would it be to get Jonathan Schoop for him! I know, pipe dream!

Trading Dunn (or PK) would create space for a LH OF like Kubel, allowing the DH slot to be rotated among the OFs.

__________________The universe is the practical joke of the General at the expense of the Particular, quoth Frater Perdurabo, and laughed. The disciples nearest him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow. Others laughed, seeing the Universal Joke. Others wept. Others laughed. Others wept because they couldn't see the Joke, and others laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke. But though FRATER laughed openly, he wept secretly; and really he neither laughed nor wept. Nor did he mean what he said.

__________________"I have the ultimate respect for White Sox fans. They were as miserable as the Cubs and Red Sox fans ever were but always had the good decency to keep it to themselves. And when they finally won the World Series, they celebrated without annoying every other fan in the country." Jim Caple, ESPN (January 12, 2011)

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the (bleeding) obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." — George Orwell

So you would, in effect, sacrifice a position of strength defensively for an offensive player? And who would play shortstop? Don't we already have a LH power hitter that plays suspect defense?

+1.

SS is a positional strength, not one that we should be so quick to just give up. Shortstops who are good defensively and at least above average offensively (and in Ramirez's case, clutch) are very, very rare. I may not be all that old, but I know good talent when I've seen it play for the last 4+ years. Ramirez is a keeper.

Trust me when I say that, unless this Sanchez kid in the minors can hit in MLB, most everyone is going to miss Alexei Ramirez when he eventually has to leave.